Lovely Music, Ltd.
Lovely Music (full name Lovely Music, Ltd.) is an American record label devoted to new American music. Based in New York City, the label was founded in 1978 by Mimi Johnson, an outgrowth of her nonprofit production company Performing Artservices, Inc. It is one of the most important and longest running labels focusing exclusively on new music and it is devoted to recording American experimental/avant-garde music.
Four Compositions
*2022 stock* "Any resemblance between these pointillistic chamber compositions and Schoenberg is purely coincidental. Delicate as to texture, curiously dispassionate as to mood, these mostly notated woodwind, string, and piano chamber works are motivically atonal, but tend to collapse into tonal cadences just to show you they know where they are. Like Ornette Coleman, Mitchell's playing with the tension between center and periphery, but in a milder, more abstract idiom and from the other directi…
Sign Of The Times
Centered around the mesmerizing voice of Robert Ashley, presented here is early version (released on LP by Lovely Music in 1979) of "The Park" and "The Backyard", a masterpiece in its simplicity of form and in the purity and intensity of its effect on the listener. These two pieces were later to become the opening and closing segments of the seven part opera for television, Perfect Lives. Personnel: Robert Ashley - voice; "Blue" Gene Tyranny - keyboards; Kris - tablas.
Chris Mann And The Use
2001 release. Chris Mann, an Australian poet, writer, performer and composer relocated to New York City, brings a recording of his signature works to Lovely Music. With the participation of Christine Bard, Anthony Coleman, Christian Marclay, Jim Pugliese, Mark Stewart, and David Watson. Chris Mann's works for voice are based on complex texts, freely composed to allow a play of wit and humor. He explores the textures and gestures of Australian speech, with its rhythms and qualities of color, pitc…
eL/Aficionado
Robert Ashley's eL/Aficionado is a group of scenes from the life of an "agent". The scenes are a kind of "debriefing" to a jury of Interrogators, in which the Interrogators (chorus) challenge the Agent (soloist) in various forms of musical dialogue. The mood of the opera owes much to our fascination with espionage and with the character of those people who lead double lives. The opera was performed many times between 1987 and 1993, and Lovely Music released a recording of the opera in 1994 (LCD …
Country Boy Country Dog
1994 release. A realization of "Blue" Gene Tyranny's How to Discover Music In the Sounds of Your Daily Life, a procedural score for recording and composing with environmental sounds. Eclectic, flowing music alternately gesturing toward impressionism and minimalism. Personnel: "Blue" Gene Tyranny - acoustic and electronic keyboards, field and studio recording, electronic transforms; Timothy Buckley - accordion in "The CBCD Intro"; the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music, featuring Robert Hughes …
Pilgrimage
** 2021 Stock ** Legendary avant-garde jazz saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell is best known for his role as a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This group is recognized for incorporating, and none-too-subtly ridiculing, the long-bearded tradition of Western art music. Mitchell, nonetheless, has something to say that is within the tradition himself, apart from, but related to his work in the field of jazz. Usually the sort of classical music piece produced by a "jazz cat" is formulated wi…
Foreign Experiences
This new release from Lovely Music features Robert Ashley's famous ensemble, the "band" who interpreted his work for 20 years, from 1992 through 2012. They included Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Marghreta Cordero, Tom Hamilton, Jacqueline Humbert, Joan La Barbara, and Amy X Neuburg. This recording was made at the Hebbel Theater, Berlin on May 12, 1995. The opera was also heard live at the Festival d'Avignon, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Musica Strasbourg, and Site Santa Fe. Foreign Experiences i…
Chanteuse
Since the early 1970s, Jacqueline Humbert has collaborated as performer, visual artist, and designer with leading innovative artists, filmmakers, choreographers and composers worldwide. Her approach to vocal performance has influenced many composers, and the works in Chanteuse represent a new and exciting extension and reinterpretation of the "song" genre. Humbert on the release: "Chanteuse is a collection of new or previously unreleased songs, many of which were written for me by a broad range …
Breaking the Surface
Two of Annea Lockwood's dramatic works dealing with issues of spiritual wholeness. Duende (1997), about shamanic transformation, is written with and performed by Thomas Buckner. Lockwood selected sounds which reminded her of certain vocal transformations heard in recordings of shamanic ceremonies. In such singing, changes in the voice mirror and also help to bring about changes in the singer's mind and awareness. Within an improvisational framework, Buckner explores the possibility of change of …
Two Lines
1995 release. Two legendary composer/performers, David Rosenboom and Anthony Braxton, join forces on Two Lines to unite composition with improvisation, "new music" with "new jazz". Starting from David Rosenboom's notated score for Two Lines and his musical computer program, these musicians have achieved, to paraphrase Rosenboom, created a composition that is immediately heard. Duets with interactive HMSL software. Includes Rosenboom's Two Lines, plus compositions in collaboration with Braxton: L…
Free Delivery
1990 release. Some of "Blue" Gene Tyranny's greatest keyboard works/performances can be found here on Free Delivery. The Nocturne With and Without Memory was commissioned by Lois Svard and has also been recorded by her for Lovely Music (LCD 3051CD, 1994). Sunrise or Sunset in Texas is from Philip Makanna's film The Crack of Dawn (1983). Personnel: "Blue" Gene Tyranny - acoustic and electronic keyboards; Timothy Buckley - accordion; Joel Ryan - computer analysis.
Summer Music 1970
**original 1979 copy, still sealed** E. Jedidiah Denman, bass; Phil Harmonic, piano, accordion and harmonica; Anne Klingensmith, cello; George Lewis, trombone and bowed trombone; Frankie Mann, electric bass and flute; Maggi Payne, flute and psalter; David Rosenboom, violin and viola; Joel Ryan, stereo rotation; John Sackett, clarinets; Mimi Shevitz, voice; Tony Truhang, piano; "Blue" Gene Tyranny, piano
A collection of eleven charming vignettes, portraits in sound of Bekaert's friends. It is a g…
Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)
Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) is the first of four operas about the "American" consciousness. The tetralogy, including Foreign Experiences, eL/Aficionado and Now Eleanor's Idea, is based on the notion of a sequence of events seen from four, different points of view. The operas share principal characters and vocal techniques (including the relationship of the voice to instrumental settings). The singers are used interchangeably as soloists and members of a chorus. The immediacy of choral respons…
Crystal
Maggi Payne's musical imagination is vivid: she is interested in the surreal, the inward, the micro, and the accumulation of physical and psychological tension. Periods of silence gently evolve into flowing drones of complex resonances. Oozing drones evolve into dense and powerful peaks of short duration. On one cut, multi-tracked voices shift in and out of phase, creating alternately shimmering and percussive patterns; on another, digital delay and 32 separate flute tracks create a rain forest …
Crone music
2019 repress on CD; 1990 release. Commissioned by Mabou Mines, the experimental theater group from New York, for their interpretation of King Lear, Pauline Oliveros's Crone Music is a subtle and haunting electronic music endeavor. Interfacing an abundance of digital delay processors, reverb effects, and foot pedals to bend pitches from piercing to twisted, sonorous tones, with her one-of-a-kind expanded accordion, Oliveros produces rich, eerie textures. Personnel: Pauline Oliveros -solo accordio…
Music as a second language
2019 Repress. Speech melodies extracted from sources as various as language instruction recordings, hypnotists and televangelists are re-synthesized and applied to digital musical instruments, becoming eerily beautiful, "the singing of voices more ancient than language." Performed by Paul DeMarinis Hidden beneath speech's words and music's melodies I hear the singing of a voice more ancient than language. Brain's secret convulsions making muscles articulate, shaking the world with a song now lo…
73 Poems
Joan La Barbara's composition, 73 Poems, was commissioned, produced and recorded by Permanent Press (Brooklyn, NY) to accompany the publication of Kenneth Goldsmith's 73 Poems as a book and as a suite of lithographs. La Barbara's works often involve multiple layers of her own voice, creating a kind of sonic canvas on which she throws splashes of vocal colors. On this CD, her potent combination of vocal and studio expertise makes it possible for her to represent in music some of the most distinct…
Crash
Crash was Robert Ashley's last opera. It premiered at the Whitney Biennial weeks after his death in 2014, and presented again in 2015 at Roulette, where this recording was made. Featuring the original cast: Gelsey Bell, Amirtha Kidambi, Brian McCorkle, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder, and Aliza Simons. Music Director: Tom Hamilton. "What I have appreciated most about previous reconceptions of Ashley's operas was the extent to which newcomers found fresh possibilities. Already in Crash, broadened horizons…
Atalanta (Acts Of God) Volume II
2010 release. Three of the satellite songs from Robert Ashley's opera Atalanta (Acts of God) - each inspired or revolving around one of the main characters of the opera, Max, Willard and Bud. Atalanta (Acts of God) was written in the 1980s, begun while Ashley was still in production for the television opera, Perfect Lives.
The many hours of material were performed throughout the world in many
different configurations, but this is the first time these songs have
been available on CD. Personnel…
Sferics - Music for solo performer
'Sferics is the shortened term for atmospherics, natural radio-frequency emissions in the ionosphere, caused by electromagnetic energy radiated from nearby or distant lightning. These signals - resonant clicks and pops, called tweeks and bonks by scientists - occur in the audible range of humans and may be picked up by antennas and amplified for listening. They are best received at night, far from power lines. Occasionally, certain sferics get caught on and travel long distances along the magnet…